Beard Science: Winston Brothers, Book 3

Jennifer Sylvester wants one thing, and that one thing is not to be Tennessee's reigning Banana Cake Queen. Ever the perpetual good girl and obedient daughter, Jennifer is buckling under the weight of her social media celebrity, her mother's ambitions, and her father's puritanical mandates. Jennifer is officially desperate. And desperate times call for Cletus Winston.

I'll Give You the Sun

Jude and her brother, Noah, are incredibly close twins. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude surfs and cliff-dives and wears red-red lipstick and does the talking for both of them. But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking. Something has happened to wreck the twins in different and divisive ways…until Jude meets a cocky, broken, beautiful boy, as well as an unpredictable new mentor.

Hopeless

Would you rather know a truth that makes you feel hopeless, or keep believing the lies? Beloved and bestselling author Colleen Hoover returns with the spellbinding story of two young people with devastating pasts who embark on a passionate, intriguing journey to discover the lessons of life, love, trust--and above all, the healing power that only truth can bring.

One True Loves

In her 20s Emma Blair marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. They build a life for themselves, far away from the expectations of their parents and the people of their hometown. They travel the world together, living life to the fullest. On their first wedding anniversary, Jesse is on a helicopter over the Pacific when it goes missing. Just like that, Jesse is gone forever.

The Best Man

Faith Holland left her hometown after being jilted at the altar. Now a little older and wiser, she's ready to return to the Blue Heron Winery, her family's vineyard, to confront the ghosts of her past, and maybe enjoy a glass of red. After all, there's some great scenery there.... Like Levi Cooper, the local police chief - and best friend of her former fiancé. There's a lot about Levi that Faith never noticed, and it's not just those deep green eyes.

Don't Let Me Go

Former Broadway dancer and current agoraphobic Billy Shine has not set foot outside his apartment in almost a decade. He has glimpsed his neighbors--beautiful manicurist Rayleen, lonely old Ms. Hinman, bigoted and angry Mr. Lafferty, kind-hearted Felipe, and nine-year-old Grace and her former addict mother, Eileen. But most of them have never seen Billy. Not until Grace begins to sit outside on the building's front stoop for hours every day, inches from Billy's patio.

It Ends with Us

Lily hasn't always had it easy, but that's never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She's come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up - she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily's life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

A Love Letter to Whiskey

It's crazy how fast the buzz comes back after you've been sober for so long. Whiskey stood there, on my doorstep, just like he had one year before. Except this time, there was no rain, no anger, no wedding invitation - it was just us. >It was just him - the old friend, the easy smile, the twisted solace wrapped in a glittering bottle. It was just me - the alcoholic, pretending like I didn't want to taste him, realizing too quickly that months of being clean didn't make me crave him any less.

Wrong

I have a history of picking the wrong guy. Gay? Player? Momma's boy? Check, check and check. Now I can't stop fantasizing about one of the customers at the coffee shop I work at between classes. It's just a harmless crush, right? It's not like I ever see this guy outside of the coffee shop. It's not like I'm going to see him while attempting to get birth control at the student clinic. While wearing a paper gown. While sitting on an exam table. Because he's the doctor. Shoot. Me.

Say You Want Me

There's no way I'll fall for Wyatt Hennington. He can keep his Southern drawl, irresistible smile, and those pick-up lines all to himself. I made the mistake of sleeping with him not once, but twice. I'm not stupid enough to give him round three, especially after he left me in the middle of the night so I could see myself out. I vow to return to Philadelphia and forget him.

Big Rock

My dad needs me to cool it for a bit. With conservative investors in town wanting to buy his flagship Fifth Avenue jewelry store, he needs me not only to zip it up, but to look the part of the committed guy. Fine. I can do this for Dad. After all, I've got him to thank for the family jewels. So I ask my best friend and business partner to be my fiancée for the next week. Charlotte's up for it. She has her own reasons for saying yes to wearing this big rock.

Heft

Forrmer academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn’t left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career - if he can untangle himself from his family drama.

Secrets of a Charmed Life

Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for decades...beginning with who she really is. What Kendra receives from Isabel is both a gift and a burden--one that will test her convictions and her heart.

Reason to Breathe: Breathing, Book 1

In the affluent town of Weslyn, Connecticut, where most people worry about what to be seen in and who to be seen with, Emma Thomas would rather not be seen at all. She’s more concerned with feigning perfection - pulling down her sleeves to conceal the bruises, not wanting anyone to know how far from perfect her life truly is. Without expecting it, she finds love. It challenges her to recognize her own worth - at the risk of revealing the terrible secret she’s desperate to hide.

The Bird and the Sword

The day my mother was killed, she told my father I wouldn't speak again, and she told him if I died, he would die too. Then she predicted the king would sell his soul and lose his son to the sky. My father wants desperately to be king, and I just want to be free. But freedom will require escape, and I'm a prisoner of my mother's curse and my father's greed. In a land purged of enchantment, love might be the only magic left, and who could ever love...a bird?

The Prayer Box: A Novel

When Iola Anne Poole, an old-timer on Hatteras Island, passes away in her bed at ninety-one, the struggling young mother in her rental cottage, Tandi Jo Reese, finds herself charged with the task of cleaning out the rambling Victorian house. Running from a messy, dangerous past, Tandi never expects to find more than a temporary hiding place within Iola's walls, but everything changes with the discovery of eighty-one carefully decorated prayer boxes, one for each year, dating from Iola's youth to her last days.

Venetia

Venetia Lanyon, beautiful, intelligent and independent, lives in comfortable seclusion in rural Yorkshire with her precocious brother Aubrey. Her future seems safe and predictable: Either marriage to the respectable but dull Edward Yardley, or a life of peaceful spinsterhood. But when she meets the dashing, dangerous rake Lord Damerel, her well-ordered life is turned upside down, and she embarks upon a relationship with him that scandalizes and horrifies the whole community.

600 Hours of Edward

A 39-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Edward Stanton lives alone on a rigid schedule in the Montana town where he grew up. His carefully constructed routine includes tracking his most common waking time (7:38 a.m.), refusing to start his therapy sessions even a minute before the appointed hour (10:00 a.m.), and watching one episode of the 1960s cop show Dragnet each night (10:00 p.m.). But when a single mother and her nine-year-old son move in across the street, Edward’s timetable comes undone....

The Glass Kitchen

Portia Cuthcart never intended to leave Texas. Her dream was to run the Glass Kitchen restaurant her grandmother built decades ago. But after a string of betrayals and the loss of her legacy, Portia is determined to start a new life with her sisters in Manhattan... and never cook again. But when she moves into a dilapidated brownstone on the Upper West Side, she meets 12-year-old Ariel and her widowed father Gabriel, a man with his hands full trying to raise two daughters on his own.

Royally Screwed

Nicholas Arthur Frederick Edward Pembrook, Crowned Prince of Wessco, aka His Royal Hotness, is wickedly charming, devastatingly handsome, and unabashedly arrogant - hard not to be when people are constantly bowing down to you. Then, one snowy night in Manhattan, the prince meets a dark-haired beauty who doesn't bow down. Instead she throws a pie in his face.

The Wanderer: Thunder Point, Book 1

Nestled on the Oregon coast is a small town of rocky beaches and rugged charm. Locals love the land’s unspoiled beauty. Developers see it as a potential gold mine. When newcomer Hank Cooper learns he’s been left an old friend’s entire beachfront property, he finds himself with a community’s destiny in his hands. Cooper has never been a man to settle in one place, and Thunder Point was supposed to be just another quick stop. But Cooper finds himself getting involved with the town. And with Sarah Dupre, a woman as complicated as she is beautiful.

Kaleidoscope Hearts

He was my older brother's best friend. He was never supposed to be mine. I thought we would get it out of our systems and move on. One of us did. One of us left. Now he's back, looking at me like he wants to devour me. And all those feelings I'd turned into anger are brewing into something else, something that terrifies me. He broke my heart last time. This time he'll obliterate it.

Burying the Honeysuckle Girls

Althea Bell is still heartbroken by her mother's tragic, premature death - and tormented by the last, frantic words she whispered into young Althea's ear: Wait for her. For the honeysuckle girl. She'll find you, I think, but if she doesn't, you find her. Adrift ever since, Althea is now fresh out of rehab and returning to her family home in Mobile, Alabama, determined to reconnect with her estranged, ailing father.

Clear

From Jessica Park comes Clear, a thriller, a paranormal, and a passionate romance that crosses genres and breaks boundaries. Stella Ford's grasp on reality is already loose, and it's about to come undone. When the college junior flees Chicago and leaves her toxic family behind, she heads for coastal Maine to find the one person who brought her peace years ago: Sam Bishop. But the Sam she once knew now has painful secrets.

Publisher's Summary

He was tall, at least six feet, with dirty blond hair that hung over his eyes. His T-shirt read Nietzsche Is My Homeboy.

So, that was Matt. Who Julie Seagles likes. A lot. But there is also Finn. Who she flat out loves.

Complicated? Awkward? Completely.

But really, how was this freshly-minted Boston transplant and newbie college freshman supposed to know that she would end up living with the family of an old friend of her mother’s? This was all supposed to be temporary. Julie wasn’t supposed to be important to the Watkins family, or to fall in love with one of the brothers. Especially the one she’s never quite met. But what does that really matter? Finn gets her, like no one ever has before. They have connection. But here’s the thing about love, in all its twisty, bumpy permutations - it always throws you a few curves. And no one ever escapes unscathed.

First off ... I am a complete Nerd, so I am a huge fan of Matt and his quirky t-shirts and awkward social skills. I can totally relate. This book pulled me in from the start. I listened to it in two days... I enjoyed all the twist and turns of the book along with the modern draw of social media. Jessica Park did a wonderful job of drawing me in and keeping me interested throughout. I have listened to the book twice now.

This story was quirky, fun, and predictable (but not in a bad way!). Even though the reader can figure out the underlying plot there are still aspects that are surpassing, amusing and touching. Julie arrives in Boston to start her first year of college only to find out the apartment she put a deposit on doesn't exist. Her mother pulls some last minute strings and Julie is off to spend a few days with a family of an old friend of her mom's. This Watkins family is ecentric. There's nerdy college student Matt, the Harvard professor mom, ultra brainy research analysis dad, and immature 13 year old Celeste. Out of the picture, traveling the world is the handsome eldest brother Finn. Oh, and then there's Flat Finn, the life size cut out of the real Fynn that Celeste totes around with her wherever she goes. While the family dynamics are certainly strange, Julie really connects with them, especially Finn who she strikes up an intimate on line relationship with via Facebook. But then there's Matt who she's really good friends with. Julia sets out to help Celeste loosen her dependence on Flat Fynn while uncovering the real reason behind the family's dysfunction.

This touching, heartfelt story is well played-out and well written. It tugs at the heartstrings and does have emotional moments so for maximum appreciation it helps if that's what you are in the mood for. I liked the characters very much (Celeste, for one, is an amazing character..so intelligent and precocious). Though I also very much enjoyed Julia and Matt's characters. There is a lot more to this story than the description reveals...this is the story of one young woman unexpectedly beginning a relationship with a family of highly intelligent and loving people who are also in severe denial and emotional trauma after a terribly sad loss. .. and, of the love she finds with one member of this family. In complete full disclosure, yes some readers may find it a bit predictable (depending on how your mind works at picking up clues) I picked up on what was going on about two-thirds of the way through the book, though I did not guess exactly what happened. That "moment of discovery" doesn't always have to be at the very end of a story. Honestly, that did not cause me to enjoy it any less. Julia Whelan's performance really enhanced the story and brought the characters to life. She does a wonderful job. I definitely recommend this one!

Where does Flat-Out Love rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This has got to be one of my favorite audiobooks. The story was good, engaging, romantic, dramatic, and sweet. The narrator's performance was incredible. I listen to 30 audiobooks a year, her narration was incredible.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I might not have cried, but I definitely choked up and gasped. The story and performance was very emotional and it really came through.

Any additional comments?

This was fantastic! I will definitely get more from this author and look for this narrator again. Excellent.

When I read this book I "Loved" it, but hearing Julia Whelan narrate it...she brought it to life. I kept forgetting one person was narrating. The narration is what makes an audiobook. I loved the character Julie right from the beginning. If she were real she would be my best friend. The quick wit drew me in and the fun-loving bantar kept me there. Matt's nerdy geekdom and Celeste's intellectual calibur tugged at my heart and wrapped me around their lil fingers. This book is now on my "Favorite Books" list.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I found it entertaining at first, however, it became predictable somewhere after chapter 18 and towards the end.

What was most disappointing about Jessica Park’s story?

I hate when it takes only a short read to figure out what was to happen in the story. But it is cute and rather stupid. A pleasant enough journey, though I was waiting for it to end too early in the book. The characters are somewhat flat as is the overall love affair which is the basis on which the book is built. But take it for a day and that is enough.

Have you listened to any of Julia Whelan’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

no, she was ok

Was Flat-Out Love worth the listening time?

not really, i got bored after first 10 chapters

Any additional comments?

People 21 and younger would enjoy it more. Facebook updates bored me after a while.